Jeff Koons at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel / MOUSSE CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZINE

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Jeff Koons at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel

June 26~2012

Jeff Koon’s exhibition at Fondation Beyeler focuses on three central series of works – The New, Banality and Celebration – which represent crucial stages in Koons’s development and lead to the nucleus of his thinking and creative activity.

The exhibition spans a wide arc from The New, the young artist’s early series, to Celebration, to which new pieces are still being added today. In between we find Banality, an influential grouping with a manifesto-like character and crucial for Koons’s self-definition as an artist. Taken together, these three series reflect the core of Koons’s thinking and the internal cohesion of the entire oeuvre, something that tends to be obscured by the system of groups of works with their separate titles.

In The New, which would become determinant for the artist’s development, he purposely focused on factory-new, unused vacuum cleaners and carpet cleaning appliances of the Hoover brand, which, placed over flourescent tubes, are encased in plexiglass cases. In this way, the objects create an impression of cleanliness and seductive value, embodying the ideal of newness. Basic themes of this series are integrity, innocence and purity — values that run through Koons’s oeuvre as a whole. In terms of their stringent arrangement and placement on fluorescent lights, these objects recall Minimal Art.

From The New series, the exhibition presents thirteen works, including a display window installation, reconstructed with the original vacuum cleaners, that was on view in 1980 at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. In this series, the celebration of newness finds expression not only in the vacuum cleaner works but in the programmatic The New Jeff Koons (1980), comprising a lighted box with a black and white photo of the artist as a boy. The young Koons’s self-confidence had already become evident by this time.

The ready-made-like everyday objects in The New metamorphosed in Banality into strange and provocative sculptures in wood, porcelain and mirrored glass, made by traditional crafts methods. Their motifs were taken equally from art history and popular culture, and collaged into innovative figures with a Baroque-oriented aesthetic. With the much-acclaimed Banality series, the artist not only placed the definition of art on a new foundation but advanced to become a star of the international art scene.

The exhibition includes sixteen sculptures and reliefs, a major portion of the series of twenty sculptural figures. The motifs in Banality stem from a wide range of imagery from Renaissance and Baroque art, popular magazines, and the world of toys and postcards. The initial motif is modified such that the figures run through a transformation in terms of change of scale, medium or material which lends them new potentials of interpretation.

The guiding idea behind Banality is the self-acceptance of the viewer conveyed by ostensibly banal things. This idea is embodied in the polychrome, quasi-religious wood sculpture Ushering in Banality (1988), which as it were manifests the banal as Koons’s fundamental ideal.

The Celebration series represents Koons’s most ambitious series to date, intended to comprise twenty large-scale sculptures in perfectly crafted stainless steel and sixteen large-format paintings. The exhibition includes ten of these paintings.

In Celebration, the artist addresses things familiar and transitory, children and childhood, in motifs that call to mind children’s birthdays and holiday customs, yet whose monumental sculptural forms are simultaneously stylized into the iconic. In terms of style, Celebration represents something in the nature of a synthesis between the minimalist aesthetic of The New and the Baroque opulence of Banality, and links up with the involvement with childhood seen in earlier series.

In Celebration, Koons not only developed his sculptural language further but took a step into painting, which appeared for the first time on an equal footing with sculpture in his oeuvre. The paintings in the series are based on arrangements of real objects created by the artist, photographed, and reworked by means of a complex process of schematization, then considerably enlarged and transferred to canvas. The central motif is placed in front of draped, reflecting foil in which certain parts of the object are reflected many times over, usually in distorted form. The aesthetic effect of the paintings, which owe much to Pop Art, is determined by their “objective”, virtually hyper-realistic approach.

Two sculptures are on view in Berower Park at the Fondation Beyeler: in the pond in the northern area of the park, Balloon Flower (Blue) (1995-2000), and in the park’s front area, the monumental floral sculpture Split-Rocker (2000).

at Fondation Beyeler, Basel

until September 2, 2012

Above – Stacked, 1988
Photo: Jeff Koons Studio / Jim Strong, New York